Toby Young is the founder and editor of the Daily Sceptic – an online outlet which started life during the pandemic as “Lockdown Sceptics”, where its writers campaigned against public health measures like the wearing of facemasks and social distancing, while underplaying the severity of Covid-19. In 2024, the Daily Sceptic raised the Covid vaccine as a potential cause of Kate Middleton’s cancer, while speculating that as many as 25,000 British people may have been killed by vaccine side effects.
Lord Toby Young, the journalist and Baron of Acton, has today been named the 2026 recipient of the “Rusty Razor” award, the prize given by The Skeptic to the year’s worst promoters of pseudoscience.
As well as its anti-vaccine output, under Young the Daily Sceptic has become one of the most prolific climate change denialist websites in the UK. Its dedicated “The Climate Skeptic” arm regularly publishes climate change misinformation that undermines the UK’s climate crisis mitigation responses – including frequently reproducing reports published by the fossil fuel industry-funded Global Warming Policy Foundation. An investigation from campaign group Democracy for Sale found Toby Young’s other organisation – the “non partisan” Free Speech Union – received significant funding from conservative Christian lobby groups and organisations linked to climate change denial. The Free Speech Union took out a High Court injunction to prevent journalists reporting on their other sources of funding.
Young’s pseudoscientific output has appeared beyond the Daily Sceptic website. Young is currently the associate editor of The Spectator, contributing editor of The Critic, and is a prior associate editor of Quillette. He is a regular contributor to UnHerd, GB News and the Telegraph. In 2021, the press regulator forced the Telegraph to correct one of Young’s articles, ruling he had been “significantly misleading” in claiming that vaccines could not confer “natural immunity”.
The Daily Sceptic is owned by the registered company Skeptics Ltd, where Young is a director alongside his colleague Noah Carl – a former University of Cambridge sociologist who was sacked in 2019 after promoting the discredited science of eugenics, and who is now the editor of the “race science” magazine, Aporia. In 2018, Toby Young resigned from a role as director of the Office for Students after it emerged he had attended a pro-eugenics conference.
In 2024, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union provided legal support to the “race realist” philosopher Nathan Cofnas to unsuccessfully sue the University of Cambridge after Cofnas was sacked for breaching the conditions of his employment in questioning whether academics of colour were genetically incapable of doing their jobs. Later the same year, the charity Sense About Science partnered with the Free Speech Union on a series of lectures on how to restore trust in science.
In 2025, Toby Young was appointed by Kemi Badenoch to the House of Lords, taking up the title of Baron Young of Acton. While sitting in the House of Lords, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union advised JD Vance to lobby against Young’s own government.
The Skeptic Editor Michael Marshall said: “Toby Young and his Daily Sceptic have enthusiastically endorsed some of the most harmful forms of pseudoscience we’ve seen in recent history. Young and his team spent the pandemic minimising the threat of Covid and exaggerating the dangers of mask-wearing, social distancing, and eventually vaccination. From there, they pivoted to climate change denial.
“What they label as ‘scepticism’ far more closely resembles cheap contrarianism and ideologically-driven pseudoscience. Scratch the surface of many of the cases promoted by the Free Speech Union and what we see instead is religious conservativism trying to impose their own personal morality onto the society around them – which is perhaps no surprise, given the apparent support the organisation receives from campaigning bodies like anti-abortion American lobby groups.
“It is perhaps no surprise, then, that when so-called ‘race realists’ were back in the public eye, Young and his various organisations stood by them, claiming it was an important principle of ‘academic freedom’ – when, in reality, they were attempting to use the legitimacy of academia to lend credibility to fundamentally discredited views.
“For pushing all manner of pseudoscientific beliefs, and doing so under the mislabel of ‘scepticism’, we have named Toby Young and the Daily Sceptic our 2026 recipients of the Rusty Razor Award”.
The ‘Rusty Razor’ award was announced as part of The Skeptic’s annual Ockham Awards at a ceremony that took place during Saturday’s European Skeptics Congress in Liverpool. Also recognised during the event was consumer protection campaigner Martin Lewis, who won the 2026 award for Skeptical Activism.
Previous Rusty Razor winners have included Reform UK, Elon Musk, Dr Aseem Malhotra, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr Mike Yeadon, Dr Didier Raoult, Andrew Wakefield, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
